Where the Feet Went

This is where the feet (see post below) went. Into this page for the Sampler Book class I am taking from Joggles. I didn't follow the directions for this page either, but maybe I can get extra credit for going through so many steps to complete the page.

The blue fabric covering the page is some that I painted this summer. The door is another painted piece. To make this page, first I fused the fabric to felt. Then I made the bound hole in the middle. I used the part I cut out to make the door. It is attached with a fabric hinge.

I used Brilliance stamp pads to add a little more color around the edges of the page and to take down the dark splotches on the door. I fused another piece of the light blue fabric to the Pellon #70 base where the hole would be. The words are stamped with Azure Stazon ink, and then darkened with a gel pen.

The buttons started out as a jade green, but I rubbed them on the Azure Stazon ink pad to make them blue. Then I dried them with a heat gun. I found the edging in the basement. It was white. I painted it with various colors of blue. (Totally ineffective light in the basement, hence the numerous tries.) When it still wasn't right, I went at it with the Stazon and some Fabrico ink. It's glued on.

There were lots of other steps in there, but it would probably cause carpal tunnel syndrome if I typed them all out.


This is the back of the page. I wanted to try painting on fusible, but the only kind I had on hand with paper on the back was heavy weight Heat & Bond. Why not? This was an experiment. I painted it with Dye-na-Flow and Lumiere. After it was dry, I ironed it onto a piece of the blue cotton fused to a piece of felt.

It was a little blah looking, so I decided to quilt some wavy lines. If you ever decide to do this, use some kind of stabilizer on top of the painted material. The fusible has a very rubbery feel, and I had a dickens of a time sewing through it until I tried the stablilzer. I used a water soluble kind but just tore it off. I would think you could use a tear-away or even tissue paper. I just used what was closest. Then I added a little gold Lumiere along some of the quilting lines for highlights. Hmmm... Still blah, but better...

After a couple of days of meditating, I decided to put a layer of tulle on top so the painted colors wouldn't be so bright. With a piece of parchment paper on top, I just ironed it onto the page. No additional fusible needed. I decided to try some blue Brilliance around the edges and a little gold Brilliance in the middle. Finally a look that I could live with. The Brilliance, however, would not dry. It kept rubbing off on my fingers whenever I picked up the page. As a last resort, I opened the garage door, took one step into the snow-covered driveway, and sprayed it with a varnish. Yay! No more sticky fingers! Finally I glued on the edging.


Here are the feet! They are a fold-out hidden behind the door. What better way to step into your own rainbow than with multicolored feet?


To decorate the back of the feet fold-out, I used foil. The inside of the door and the opening behind the feet are also foiled. This does not show up well in the photo. The part that looks black is actually purple. The colors are much more subtle than the picture shows. I used foil glue for this application, and I found it easy to use.

No Animals Were Harmed In This Process

Step 1: Iron fabric to freezer paper. Tape freezer paper to bathroom floor. Gather paints, brushes and an old towel.


Step 2: Apply paints to freezer paper across from fabric.


Step 3: Spread paint with foam brushes and fingers to make a continuous pattern.


Step 4: Step into paint first with one foot and then the other.


Step 5: Step directly from painted area to fabric, one foot in front of the other.


Step 6: Step off fabric with one foot, placing it onto unpainted area of freezer paper. Step with other foot into bathtub.


Step 7: Place second foot in bathtub, and admire painted fabric.


Step 8: Admire painted bathtub.


Step 9: Admire painted hands.

If yer gonna make an omlette, ya gotta break some eggs.

Above is the first egg. And below is the second egg. You knew this was going to be messy, didn't you?



And here is the omlette. I'm taking a class called Sample Book through Joggles. The instructor is Janet Clark. This class appealed to me as a way to have some structured playtime with some of my stuff. So far, so good.



The front cover of my book has windows with shutters. It is made of tissue paper fused to felt which is then attached to some stiff interfacing. It is stamped and painted.



The back of the cover is above. The windows are made of Angelina film that I ironed over a rubber stamp to give a swirly design.

Below is another view of the front. You can see one shutter opened. The shutter hinges are a double layer of fabric secured between the front and the back. I decided I wanted to make a screen that will stand open rather than a book. The funny looking things on each side are the hinges where I will put the supporting dowels. Designing and manufacturing the various hinges was helped by my total lack of knowledge about engineering and architecture. If you don't know what's right, you can't do anything wrong. Especially with a seam ripper in every room.

It's Not Easy Being Red

If I could remember exactly why I decided to make a red doll--that is, a doll in red--I'd be better off. But I can't. It might have been a reaction to the color issues in the January BJP. Red sounds simple, right? Huh!

I wanted to make the doll red, red toward rust not red toward magenta. So I got my fabric, stitched the outline of the doll, and got the beads. Double huh!

Since then, there have been numerous incidents. I did such a fantastic job of matching the thread outline to the fabric that I could hardly see it. That was quickly, if temporarily, resolved by drawing on top of the outline with a soapstone pencil. Voila! Instant outline! That was a minor, but recurring, incident.

The majority of the incidents involved the red beads. Don't believe them. A red is not a red is not a red. A red by any other name is a different color. And it's hard to tell when a red is not a red or what its name is until after you've stitched it down.

The top picture shows the doll front in process. Before I ripped out a bunch of beads. And stitched more down. The lower photo shows the doll front in process. After I ripped out a bunch of beads. And stitched more down. Check out the spiral in the middle just above the hem. Does it look different? I ripped out one curly row in the spiral and replaced it. Then I ripped out another. Interesting process. I ripped out more beads on this doll than I did on all the others together. Lucky for me, I have a seam ripper in every room.



The more analytical among us are wondering why red is so difficult to work with. Am I becoming more discriminating? Fussier? Pickier? A perfectionist? Or is it the light? If you look at the two photos, you'll notice that the colors are different. The first was done in natural light. The second was done in artificial light because it's dark outside. And neither one is exactly the color of the fabric, although the lower one is closer. So I'll give that two points for the lighting.

I'll keep working on this little red doll to see how she turns out, still wondering if that large bead will stay on her head and why I didn't sign up for the color theory class at the quilt show.

My Personal Rainbow, or Not

Encouraged by other bloggers, I went to spacefem.com to find my personal rainbow. I wasn't totally crazy about the colors, so it isn't posted here. Then I wondered if I should take the quiz again or just get out the paints and paint my own rainbow. I'm going with the paints.

But I was intrigued (and still trying to avoid the scheduled encounter with the vacuum cleaner) so I decided to take another quiz. Find a Hobby. Yep. Like I really need another one...

This is the amazing result: Count in Binary Numbers. Binary numbers. Oh, please. I thought I left those behind in Math for the Elementary Teacher, circa 1963. That was in the heyday of The New Math, now no longer new and probably even extinct. I mean, why do they think I married a mathematician? It wasn't so we could spend cozy evenings by the fire counting in binary numbers. I figure that he's responsible for all math related things and I'll remember everyone's birthday.

And then something strange happened. I seemed to feel my right arm going forward to the pencil and an old envelope to start writing binary numbers, interested in whether I could get to 100. Egad!!!! I'm going to vacuum.